Golfers have a tremendous number of things to pay attention to while golfing. From aligning a shot, to addressing the ball, swinging a club, gently tapping a putt, navigating a rise, and chipping or pitching a shot with the correct angle and speed, and on, the sport requires an immense degree of concentration on a great many number of essentially contemporaneous tasks. To focus on several of these things at once is difficult, and to practice all of them with enough frequency that they become learned or ingrained as muscle memory is even more difficult.
Consequently, a huge number and variety of training aids have been developed to assist golfers in developing and playing their game. Some trainings aids focus exclusively on putting the ball, some focus even more exclusively on putting the ball straight or along a curve. Some reinforce a proper technique for holding a club. Some reinforce a particular stance to address the ball before a hit. Some aids target the backswing, others target the follow-through. In other words, there is no shortage of training aids for golfers to improve one problem at a time, or many problems at once.
One recognized characteristic of professional golfers is their ability to maintain head position during a swing. The ability to hold a head position during a swing and keep a “head-down orientation,” in which the golfer's eyes are kept on the ball, allows the golfer to ensure good and desired contact between the head of the club and the ball. It is the inclination of many amateur golfers, however, to watch the head of their club hit the ball and then follow the trajectory of the ball as it speeds away from a club strike. Most golfers bring their heads up too soon, or even before the club impacts the ball. This is somewhat understandable: It is a natural desire to watch the progress and pitch, the distance and direction of one's shots, and further, in other sports, following the ball with the eyes is encouraged. However, the best golfers in the world keep their head down through a shot, not looking up at the flight of the ball until well after the ball has been hit.
Despite the recognition that keeping one's head down during a shot is a critical characteristic of a good swing, there lacks an effective mechanism for training such behavior. In fact, until the advent of high-speed, fast-shutter cameras, it was incredibly difficult to even tell if a player had kept his or her head down during a shot. High-speed cameras helped only so much: they were limited in that they provided only delayed feedback, requiring video footage to be recorded, accessed, and replayed somewhere—usually not on a live golf course, making real-world practice impossible. A golf swing occurs with such speed that it is nearly impossible for one to tell whether he or she moved his head away from the ball around the moment of impact. And training aids for maintaining head position are equally ineffective, as such aids can be cumbersome and restrictive to wear, and do not reinforce good movement, but rather fix a person in a certain, likely unnatural, position or limit their range of motion. An improved device for monitoring head movement during a golf swing and providing instant feedback, heretofore unmet, is needed.